PICS Highlights

Grand Challenges in Groundwater Remediation

Groundwater, the potable water supply for over half of the U.S. population, is increasingly threatened by organic, inorganic and radioactive pollutants. Remediation methods are extremely, potentially prohibitively, expensive and unpredictable in their success. The mathematically based numerical model is an important tool to predict and plan groundwater management programs and remediation strategies. Current limitations of this method introduce uncertainties into rational planning for many human activities, including energy production, manufacturing, agriculture, and waste disposal.

Modeling efforts are hampered by three issues: the proper mathematical description of the physics and chemistry governing flow and transport, the sparsity of data characterizing any one site, and the computational power required to apply sophisticated models to realistic situations. The Grand Challenge addresses the issues of data sparsity and computational power. Advances in these two areas will provide valuable information and tools to improve the third: mathematical descriptions of the problem.

The only foreseeable technology to address the computational power requirement is massively parallel computing. Both in its hardware and software aspects, this is an emerging technology. The purpose of this project is to develop this technology in place, in a form powerful enough to create a broad new capability for the prediction of groundwater remediation efforts, and thus to enable improved, cost effective and reliable remediation strategies.

This project is developing a new, state-of-the-art, parallelized flow and transport code to model groundwater transport as well as supporting technologies for parameter estimation. It will validate these codes, including sample applications to contamination sites.

Members of the PICS Consortium include

• Brookhaven National Laboratory
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• University of Texas at Austin
• State University of New York at Stony Brook
• Texas A&M University [Groundwater Grand Challenge Coordinator]
• University of South Carolina
• Princeton University New member 1995